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The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?

Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al.December 15, 1967

ROBERT B. SILVERS: ... Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be
"legitimate"? ...

NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can't be answered in a
meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete
circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the
consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of
course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart
from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things.
Either he's saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to
eliminate a greater evil; or he's saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the
consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual
assumption and it's almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in
which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it's a kind of irreducible moral
judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And
these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral
judgment.

Now there is a tendency to assume that a stand based on an absolute moral judgment shows
high principle in a way that's not shown in a stand taken on what are disparagingly referred to
as "tactical grounds." I think this is a pretty dubious assumption. If tactics involves a
calculation of the human cost of various actions, then tactical considerations are actually the
only considerations that have a moral quality to them. So I can't accept a general and absolute
opposition to violence, only that resort to violence is illegitimate unless the consequences are
to eliminate a greater evil.

With this formulation, however, one moves from the abstract discussion to the context of
concrete historical circumstances where there are shades of gray and obscure complex
relations between means and ends and uncalculable consequences of actions, and so on and so
forth. Formulated in these terms, the advocates of a qualified commitment to nonviolence have
a pretty strong case. I think they can claim with very much justice that in almost all real
circumstances there is a better way than resort to violence. Let me mention a couple of
concrete instances that may shed some light on this question. I read in the Times this morning
an interview with Jeanette Rankin, who was the one member of Congress to vote against the
declaration of war on December 8, 1941, to the accompaniment of a chorus of boos and hisses.
Looking back, though, we can see that the Japanese had very real grievances, and that the
United States had quite a significant share of responsibility in those grievances back in 1941.
In fact, Japan had rather a more valid case than is customary to admit.

On November 6, 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbor, Japan had offered to eliminate the
main major factor that really led to the Pacific war, namely the Closed Door Policy in China. But
they did so with one reservation: that they would agree to eliminate the closed door in China,
which is what we'd been demanding, only if the same principle were applied throughout the
world -- that is, if it were also applied in, say, Latin America, the British Dominions, and so

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